Yes, you read that right: Bilisecond. This is odd since the structure only has an accuracy of 3.33 milliseconds. Since 2006, this has been a joke amongst .NET developers, and caused some bewilderment to Mono. There is, of course, no such thing as a bilisecond, however much the Microsoft people want to change the English Language. It isn’t a billionth of a second. An American billionth of a second is called a nanosecond (10-9), and a british billionth of a second is a picoseconds which is 10-12 of a second. (an american trillionth), and there is a microsecond which is equal to one millionth (10-6) of a second (1000 nanoseconds). We than have the millisecond, which is a thousandth (1/1,000) of a second. You will sometimes hear of the centisecond, which is 10 milliseconds (a hundredth of a second). Here is the whole list

Value

Symbol

Name

10-1

ds

decisecond

10-2

cs

centisecond

10-3

ms

millisecond

10-6

µs

microsecond

10-9

ns

nanosecond

10-12

ps

picosecond

10-15

fe

femtosecond

10-18

as

attosecond

10-21

zs

zeptosecond

10-24

ys

yoctosecond

In the case of the Billisecond, or bilisecond, we think it is a microsecond. The Dateime2 DataType of SQL Server is supposedly accurate to 100 nanoseconds, so it could be that a bilisecond was intended to be the same as 100 nanoseconds.

So the next question is this; How many seconds has this error been in the documentation unfixed? Here is our SQL Calculator.